


The Way We Hold Our Hearts

by ryyves



Category: The Woods (Comics)
Genre: A memorial and a funeral, Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-09 08:30:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12883992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: A week after Karen and the thousands of survivors return to earth, they hold a funeral for Isaac Andrews.





	The Way We Hold Our Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> "Remember not our faulty pieces.  
> Remember not our rusted parts.  
> It's not the petty imperfections that define us but  
> the way we hold our hearts."  
> — La Dispute, "Nine"

The sky goes up in light, hellfire-bright. Atoms split, bodies disintegrated on one side of the universe and  reconstructed on the other. 

This is where we start: a boy at the end of a long tunnel, an inverted stone waiting for him; a boy standing on the precipice of power, arms spread to receive the sun, declaring himself God; a boy holding Karen out of time as he laid down the plan, the endgame, always the chessmaster. 

This is the whole story, the beginning and the end. Adrian Roth, clean-shaven, his pinched face regarding the world with an air of superiority; or this: Adrian barely holding himself together, eyes rimmed with a dark red, like blood. Karen wouldn’t have noticed had she not been watching, trying to gauge the man he had become.

This is how we start: a thousand bodies stumbling free of thorns, stumbling out of the light, out of the dark tangles of the woods that had held them for millennia. Thousands of feet scrambling over roots, tripping; thousands of arms reaching for other bodies while the woods reached out to pull them back. And Karen at the edge of it, her palm sweaty through her glove, clasped unrelenting around Sander's as they pulled themselves out of the woods. Neither of them looked back, though Sander had known that forest his whole life, had grown from child to adult in it, had learned to kill in it. Though Karen had learned how to be alive in it.

And there they stood, thousands of tiny human bodies, back on the exposed soil of earth. The sheer edges of the crater rose around them, seen through trees, through bodies, through the vestiges of that pulsating light. She looked up at the endless sky, shifting from white to a dazzling blue. Isaac hadn’t bothered to bring Bay Point back. They had all known, when they set out for the last time, that there was no return.

And all she could do was look down the line of trees for a figure, indistinct but unmistakable. The light still bathed the faces of the rushing crowd, ready to disintegrate them all. She could almost see the atoms reordering themselves into human beings, the end of life as she knew it spiraling in reverse.

Near the very edge of the crater, beyond all her soldiers, beyond people who had been born and had almost died on that moon, Ben was carrying Isaac out of the light.

That was the first time Karen ever saw Isaac as a god, for in Ben's arms he was something sacred, his washed-out hair tumbling around his shoulder like a halo, his thin frame bulked up by Ben's coat, how Karen had never wanted to remember him.

The image of him there recalled the Christ-image Karen had grown up with on her grandfather’s walls  – Isaac, the man who had died to save them all. Next to him, she had been nothing but a means to an end, a bridge laid down between home and hell, the Horde and New London. At the end of the day it would always come back to Isaac; Isaac with quiet determination written across his face; Isaac who had wanted nothing but to matter, somehow, to someone, and who had let it devour him.

From the growing throng of families, figures detached themselves and rose into distinction. Mothers from the hockey team, fathers she’d seen once or twice at back to school nights, people whose names and relations she didn’t know. Her mother’s body through the smoke, a vision of the picturesque among wraiths, surging forward like a wildfire.

Karen hastily wiped tears from her eyes  –  this beautiful, dazzling world; the metal highrises she’d once seen through the windows of Bay Point and that now surrounded this patch of wild; and her mother running through it all, the smoke and the light, reaching Karen at the edge of the forest. She looked like salvation. Karen had never seen anything so blinding.

Everything was wild here; Karen’s singed body; pine needles in her hair and the scent of it so thick, so overwhelming; the dirt beneath her nails. Yet they were all still human, ugly painful incredible human. She thought of all of their human bodies reaching out for the chance to live. She held her mother tighter than she’d ever held another person. She closed her eyes and breathed in home, comfort, the promise of a happy life. The promise of a future.

“Thank God you’re home,” her mother was whispering. The rest of the world faded to a buzz in her ears, a blur in her eyes, while she held her mother. 

And then, over her mother’s shoulder, Karen saw the woman, tall, haughty, extracting herself from the grieving parents, and she pulled back. There was something still that remained undone, an assurance or a promise that remained unsaid. Victoria Roth had lived with this bile in her throat, the knowledge that her baby boy was never coming back. God. If Karen started thinking like that, it would kill her.

Karen stood before Victoria, steeling herself. She recognized Adrian in his mother’s eyes, the frigidity she’d learned to count on from him, the only thing absent when he’d faced Isaac and told him there was one last thing he could do. The only thing left. The last great adventure.

“Adrian was a hero,” she told Victoria Roth, her hands held too tight and for too long in Victoria’s grip. “In whatever twisted way.” She wouldn’t use that word around anyone else  – ‘hero.’ But what else can you say to a woman who’s lost her son?

“He’s the reason we’re here. He did more to save us than anyone alive. And who knows, maybe he’ll be back some day. Him and Isaac.”

“It’s enough,” said Victoria, in a tight voice, “to know he’s not lost forever.”

And Karen shook her head. “That’s exactly what he is. Lost forever. But I think he’s happy with that.”

\----------

That first night home, she took a scalding shower, stood under the water for thirty minutes. She scrubbed the woods from her body, inch by inch. The steam fogged up the mirror, and when she stood dripping on the carpet, she couldn’t see the shape of her body in the glass. Karen the hunter had come home in the place of the little girl blinded by the expectations of others, and she didn’t know how to fit her new self into that girl’s home, that girl’s world.

Her father found her that morning on the kitchen floor, shards of china spiraling out around her, a hand tight over her face. Quiet in his socks, he crossed the tile to her. One thirty-five a.m., a broken bowl, her back against the hard wood and the jutting handles of the cabinets, her loose hair tumbled around her shoulders, stuck to her neck. Paint the picture. A girl unable to sleep, fighting off nightmares, fixing herself a snack in the darkened kitchen.

Without a word, her father pulled out the pan and brush and began to sweep away the rubble around his daughter’s legs. She didn’t look at him, but their breathing filled up the air. Somehow that shattered bowl became Isaac, as her father swept of the pieces, fragments of him on everybody’s tongues. All of them were just bodies in space, not touching.

“Dad?” she said. “Do you think I’m a bad person?” And he swept up the china, on his knees on the kitchen tile. The moon didn’t reach them through the window. He said nothing, like he didn’t hear her. Like she was alone in space, not touching, not talking.

“No, of course not,” he said at last.

They fell silent, while he dumped the contents of the pan into the bin. She didn’t look at him, just picked at the threads of her t-shirt. How could she tell him that she had learned to shoot without flinching? Pull the string, let it snap back, like she had been born for it. The person he’d wanted her to be, all the wrong way around.

He held out a paper towel, and she pressed it to her palm, where the bowl had cut deep.

“I just wanted to be a good daughter.” She went on like this, not looking at him.

“You are. You always have been.”

“Even when I couldn’t shoot?”

“Especially then. You always knew who you were. You didn’t trust yourself, but you knew.”

\----------

The funeral was going to be a private affair, family flown out from the East Coast, and then a public memorial for all the Bay Point dead: Isaac representative of the human spirit that had fought and triumphed and emerged, drenched in blood and light; Isaac as the face of the thousands who hadn’t made it back, though if she’d had her way, it would have been Calder.  _ Fly this flag, _ she was saying, somewhere.  _ Fight for me. _

Her mother had taken her to a tailor's shop to fit an old dress into something presentable, sat in the cushioned chairs and kept her eyes on her daughter. Karen stood poised while the tailor encircled her with measuring tape, arms half raised as if she were about to fly away, watching the unfamiliar woman that wore her body in the mirror.

Karen had said she wanted to do right by Isaac, and her mother had said, “Then tell the truth.”

“I can’t,” Karen had said, and didn’t know how to explain the seizing of her chest. “I can’t talk about him that way. We were always so at odds.”

“Just speak from your heart. You care, Karen. I can see that in you. Tell me what you and that boy Adrian told me.”

There had been cameras, when they had emerged from the light  – Sanami on the air, telling the world the story of her disappearance, the story of her becoming a different woman  – a hunter and a warrior, a hero and a tragedy. And in the end it was only Karen who knew what had happened in the gap of Sanami’s story, her and Ben and Sander, and it became something sacred balanced between them. Something unspeakable.

Set a new scene: the sectioned windows pouring the vibrant early-morning sunlight across their kitchen, across her hands. Karen sat at the head of the table, stirring cereal around in her bowl but not eating it. Her mother entered the kitchen and started on the coffee. They didn’t speak. The sound of coffee beans grinding filled up the kitchen, and Karen flinched away from it. They were just bodies in space, not seeing each other, not touching.

“You sure you want to go to the funeral?” said her mother. How odd. They were eating breakfast and her mother said that.

“I’m doing okay, Mom. Really.”

But her mom had found her in the living room, middle of the night, disheveled, Netflix running, knees pulled up to her chest. A notebook filled with scratches lay on the tabletop beside her, rejected speeches for the funeral, for the memorial. Things she could never say.

“I didn’t mean to, Mom,” she said, and her voice broke. “I didn’t mean to.”

Her mother had lifted the blanket from the couch and laid it over Karen. She sat beside her on the couch, turned the TV volume down. She held Karen close. She said, “That’s okay, darling. You did all that you could.”

She was kind, but she didn’t know. Karen rested her head on her mother’s shoulder. “Yeah. I want to believe that too.”

\----------

The night chill pressed through the Karen's letter jacket as she walked, hands stuffed into her pockets, runaway hair dancing around her face. Above her, Milwaukee came alive, light pouring out of a million ordered windows, Karen caught in the middle of it. In the space between heartbeats, she saw it superseded by another city, a dark mass of obsidian spires crowding in against the rolling skyline of her hometown. This city didn’t feel like hers anymore, the way New London never did  – the foreign street corners, her house at an intersection she used to love, the night casting long shadows and making shapes out of thoughts. She walked quickly, her sneakers pounding on the pavement, her breath white in the air.

The wan streetlight cast an eerie luminescence on the bus stop and its single inhabitant. At first she didn't recognize him, with the light distorting all angles, and she thought of the ghosts of that moon’s old masters crowding in on her, trying to bar her entry as she launched an assault on a million years of history.

As she drew closer, the lines of his face solidified into a statue of sorrow that she knew well. The scars across his face reflected hers, relics of the trek to the Black City. What she would have done to have gone back in time and spared him. But Ben had made his choice, and she had known the plan, and she had trusted him. And that was what counted, in the end; what they did, not what they didn’t, and why.

This was the man she had given away to that world’s cruelty, to the light she would unleash over everything. This was the man she had held and promised nothing. There was nothing left to promise, no horror left undiscovered, just a string of tragedies that wound itself about their heads like a crown of thorns. He was still the kindest man alive.

In the soft night, Karen sat beside him, the gap between the something a million years couldn't bridge. “Ben,” she said, her low voice rupturing the silence.

She wanted to ask: Where are you going, at this time of night, in this weather? What are you running away from?

He looked at her with heavy eyes, his mouth veiled by the thick scarf wrapped around his throat. He must have looked different in the beginning, backstage with the lights gone off and Isaac dangling the key, spinning it around his finger while she watched from the corner of her eye. He must have been a boy then, eyes bright with fear or innocence or both, but if he had, she couldn’t remember. All she knew was the Ben beside her. She remembered standing in the bathroom at Bay Point, thin light from the windows pouring through, knuckles white around the sink basin, her murderer’s eyes staring back at her from the grimy mirror. How she hoped Ben didn’t see the same in himself.

Neither of them knew how to talk about it. It lingered heavy on their tongues, dripped into their lungs, threatened to drown them. He said nothing to turn her away.

He said, “We all did what we had to do, Karen.”

And there it was: Karen slamming that scrap metal blade into Adrian’s flesh, terrified it wouldn’t go in and terrified it would, blood coursing hot and thick over her shaking hands. How she felt it in her knuckles even now, years after.

“I know. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. If I could have done it — ”

“He would still be gone. That’s enough, Karen. You know as well as I do that there wasn’t any other option.”

A long silence, the thick winter air muting even their breaths.

The kindest man she had ever known, face split with tear tracks, emerging from the woods against a backdrop of light, again and again and again. The angle of Isaac's head, his body held close, fading away even as she looked at him. How could she reconcile the man in Ben’s arms with the boy she had watched prepare his assault against the heart of the world?

“You did the right thing.” And somehow it meant so much more than every time she'd uttered it before, when it was something she held close, like a mantra. like a justification. “My god, Ben, you did the right thing. He was happy, in the end. I spoke to him in the In-Between. He imprinted his mind onto the computer. He and Adrian have their work cut out for them, but they’re gonna be okay. 

“Adrian?”

“I think he’s okay now. And Isaac’s stronger now. He’ll be able to hold his own.”

It must have been so much worse for Ben, the boy he loved begging for an end. And Karen and Adrian, counting the seconds, waiting to see whether Isaac would succumb.

So they stayed there, Karen watching Ben’s breath in the air, as the sky opened. Meandering flakes of snow floated past the bus shelter, landing on their knees and shoes. The snow filled up the sidewalk, filled up the road, fell thick across her Milwaukee. It flickered through the glow of the street lamp, pale, dancing like shrapnel.

She pulled out a pair of gloves and put them on while Ben, desolate in the cold, held his hands on his knees and didn’t look at her.

The headlights of a bus illuminated the falling snow, wreathing Ben’s face in light. It kicked up slush as it stopped beside them, but Ben didn’t stand. “Aren’t you going?” Karen asked, and Ben looked for a long time at the lighted windows.

His voice came eerie in the snow-quiet. “No. I don’t think I am. I needed some time to think, away from this town. That’s all. And I don’t know if I can face his parents again. But I’m not going anywhere.”

Ben holding the body; Isaac’s parents extracting themselves from the crowd. He must have returned Isaac to them, while she was talking with Victoria.

How could she say: Do you still feel in your hands all the horrible things they've done, the way I feel Calder's blood trickling over mine? The way I feel Adrian’s?

And he said, “Do you miss it? The way things were, in the woods?”

Did she miss the first world that gave her a purpose? Christ. “All the time,” she said. “I think when you get used to something, it stays with you, and it takes a long time to undo it. But I wouldn’t go back for anything.” And the snow came down. 

“What are you going to do from here?” she said.

“The same as you. Find a way.”

She stared out into the night, leaning back against the hard glass of the bus stop. “Yeah.” And she took his hand, here in the dark, and held tight.

\----------

The crowd grew, family pulling up on the curb outside the Andrews’ house. It was still snowing. Too many from Bay Point, from New London, had lost loved ones by Isaac’s hands; too many blamed him alone, so the inside of the house was populated mostly by relatives, some parents from the school undertaking their own grief.

Twirling a strawberry on the prongs of her fork, Karen scanned the crowd. It had grown noisy in the house, full of the chatter of people unsure how to express grief and people who knew it too well, and people like Karen, trapped someplace in the middle.

By the sliding glass doors, she made out Ben’s familiar shoulders, the Andrews’ faces growing familiar. The woman held an empty wineglass, into which her husband was pouring rich Merlot.

Karen moved through the crowd of people who knew Isaac’s parents but never knew him, until she could hear. Ben was saying, “He wanted you to know.”

Brave Ben, she thought, for what do you say to a parent who has lost their son? To a family torn up by the roots? How can you make their grief easier? She thought of sweet little Carrie, the first casualty. How could she ever forget the first death she’d witnessed? She had loved and lost, but she couldn’t begin to imagine the pain the Andrews’ were experiencing, the pain of people like Victoria, with her fierce eyes like a wall between her and the world.

Ben had brought the body back, wrapped in his coat and held tight against his chest. Was Ben telling them what he had done, that he was the last person who had seen Isaac breathing? Or did he spare them? Did he tell them stories of Isaac alive, Isaac holding fiercely onto his humanity to the last? His bloodless death, his spotless body emerging with Ben from the nightmare world they’d come of age in. All his blood on her hands, and the blood of all those he’d killed, too. And here Ben was still standing before the parents, passing along Isaac’s last message. Somehow, Karen felt, it would be an act of violation to interrupt this, so she wandered through the house, mouth a thin dark line. She took it in. This was Isaac’s life, spread before her. The dull chatter all around rose and faded.

Photographs, in old frames and new, decorated the wall beside the stairs. Pictures of Isaac hung beside documentation of his parents’ lives. There was Isaac with his braces, grinning at the camera. There he stood on stage, beside an elaborate two-story set. There Isaac as a child, all in white. It was almost perverse, all these stills of a life she had never known. A life she had helped to end.

She trailed her fingers over the wood and plastic of picture frames. There was something sacrilegious about this, something irreverent, something violating. His memory was not hers to touch. All she had done was ruin him.

The light through the sectioned windows fell soft and unreal across the furniture. It wreathed the company in warmth, made this home seem softer than it was. Somewhere above her loomed Isaac’s bedroom, larger than anything, still untouched  –  or maybe not. Maybe bereavement only lasted so long for couples like these, childless and no worse off for it. But Karen had seen Victoria refusing to fall apart before the spectre of her son. She had to believe.

All these funerals reminded her of Calder, but this one the most strongly. There were endless dead, so many funerals to attend, both here and on the moon, and Karen had stopped showing up. She had thrown up her walls. Classmates, acquaintances, teachers she had adored as a sophomore, all dead. If she attended every funeral, it would swallow her whole.

And now she couldn’t shake images of Calder; Calder limp in Nigel’s arms, and Karen refusing to step away. Calder bleeding out, all that reddish mud trickling away from him like spokes on a wheel, like rays of a sun. Calder distracted for a second and that spear sliding through him so fast it grazed her stomach too, and her own blood trickled down and merged with his; and Karen rocking back and forth, his body encircled in hers, screaming at the heavens.

Nigel had pulled her away by her waist, kicking and clawing, an ugly scream ripping apart her throat. Then the foliage swallowed them, and shut out his murderer, and she was alone in the world with the ghost of the boy she loved.

They had a proper funeral there at Bay Point, even though few had known Calder and even fewer had liked him. Karen had stood as close to the tomb as she could, with Casey on the other side, looking nowhere but the place where his baby brother was not breathing.

And now, Isaac’s ruined body in that casket in the living room, relatives flown out from Pittsburgh and Charlotte, his hair cut short, his eyes shut, his contentment barely half as complete as that of the boy she’d seen in the computer. Fuck.

Karen took her hands off the photographs, Isaac’s whole life displayed obscenely for her. She poured wine into a glass, swirled it, watched the shifting light on the walls. She moved through the crowd, touching no one.

Women with Chicago accents spoke in whispers in the middle of the room, their cardigans rustling with all the people moving past them. She began to piece it together.

Isaac, always the black sheep, an unremarkable B-average student; kind but never outstandingly so; fading invisible into the beige walls, absorbing the words of his family. Isaac learning young to pick up the pieces so no one could see the cracks. He had been nobody. God. Fuck. She’d never even known him.

And he was ever the peacemaker, one hand to Adrian’s chest and the next to the flame, as if by the force of will alone he could stop the fire that would burn humanity down. As if he could stop his fall, his gentle voice to Adrian begging: Please, hear me, just this once. Isaac voiceless, and his parents filling his mouth with the son they’d wanted and hadn’t received, his mouth filling up with flowers, there at the funeral, rose petals spilling from between his teeth, lilies tumbling out from beneath his eyelids, while his relatives watched, and hated everything he had become.

\----------

Karen found Ben on the back lawn, standing alone by the fence. She pressed her hand to the sliding glass door. She should leave him like this, in his reverie; she should let him grieve. She stepped onto the patio.

Stopping beside Ben, she looked out at their Milwaukee, the home they’d dreamt of for three years. 

“I know,” she said, and he looked at her. “You’ll carry him inside of you for the rest of your life.”

A wan sun pushed through thin clouds, but the air was still frigid. This time, Ben wore gloves. The air slicing through her thin collar made her feel alive.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to handle it. I don’t know if I ever will be,” said Ben.

“Do you remember when I lost Calder and I visited his tomb every day? I’ll be here for you, as long as you need it.”

He looked at her, cloudy-eyed. “Thank you, Karen.”

But she knew it was something he had to carry alone, a burden she could never lift off his shoulders, off his heart. He would have nights where he wouldn’t sleep for thinking of Isaac, for reliving his death. He would have days where he wished he’d died himself, and sometimes these would outnumber the rest. She wished she knew how to make it easier.

\----------

The wind slid through her dress that day, through thin tights and the coat she'd borrowed from her mother; through the scarf, a splash of color in Navy blue, tied close to her mouth. It was early December. Karen stood beside her mother, stealing covert glances at the other mourners, friends and relatives flown out for the funeral. This was far from the only funeral Milwaukee would be holding in the coming weeks. They would hold Maria’s in a few days, and Karen would stand in the same dress and try not to let it reopen her grief. And little Carrie, who had died that first day, the first person she hadn’t been able to save.

If she hadn’t killed Adrian, she could have prevented this. But if she hadn’t killed Adrian, they would all have died years ago. Still, all this blood on her hands  – Calder’s as she tried to stop up the wound, Adrian’s hot and thick all over her coat, Isaac’s when she stood impassive and let him walk to his death  – it burned her fingers through her winter gloves.

This was how it had gone: Isaac had turned to her when Adrian had given him the plan, without flinching, his expression controlled, content, and she had nodded. There was nothing left to do, and they all knew it. 

How could she get that out of her head? How could she rewrite the story when she was not just accomplice, but murderer?

There had been no blood. God, for the first time since this story began, there had been no blood.

And all these still and silent faces, buttoned-up in black while the wind tore at the loose ends of trousers and jackets and skirts. The solemnity that fell over this moment, Isaac in the computer looking back at her. Smiling. God, for the first time she could remember, he was smiling. It had lit up that bleak world.

The man and woman at the foot of the casket had the same washed-out look Isaac always wore; paler, in this thin light, than Isaac ever was. (He was so full of life, and it had turned inward and devoured him.)

She stood, shivering, as they shoveled dirt over the casket. This was it, then. Curtains close, big applause, and Isaac there, under all that dirt. Isaac somewhere thousands of light years above their heads, fighting a war that would never end.

Isaac’s parents lingered long by the open grave, while relatives filed off toward the cemetery gates and the half-filled parking lot, unable to stand another moment in Isaac’s presence, the boy who had made himself so small for them turned larger and stronger than anyone alive in death. Served them right. As the crowd thinned, Karen made her way to them, both of them spectral in black, their features fading even as she grew closer.

She extended her gloved hand, a perfunctory gesture, and they shook it. She tugged at the scarf around her throat, trying to transfer words from her head to her tongue.

“My name's Karen Jacobs,” she said. “I knew your son.”

\----------

Karen stood atop a hastily constructed stage, her back to the earthen wall, in the place where Bay Point no longer stood. The microphone loomed so close she could hear her breath echoing through the crater. 

Floodlights, installed some time after the disappearance, beat down on her, while the flickering windows of the surrounded buildings conjured the illusion of transience. Candles burned on the makeshift stage before her. This was not her home, she thought. Her home lay with the indigo trees that littered the surrounding concrete.

“Isaac Andrews was a lot of things,” she told the waiting country, the waiting world, the waiting crowd in the crater of Bay Point. Her voice echoed back at her, the microphone looming close to her mouth. She had told the parents first.

“He was courageous. He was kind. He was silly. He had such a sense of justice, and big dreams, and one of the biggest hearts I’ve ever known. And he hated me.”

She could hear the harsh winter wind whipping through coats and scarves, and feared that it would swallow her voice altogether. This was not her story to tell.

“He was never a bad kid. I don't think any of them were. I don't think any of them ever wanted to be, but a world like that makes you crazy. It makes you do things you never thought you were capable of.” A breath, a beat in the scene. “You are going to hear stories about Isaac that you probably won’t believe, and unfortunately they’re all true. But he was so much more than that.”

Maybe it was because she had seen him in the In-Between, because she’d seen him in the computer, the way he wanted to be remembered. Maybe it was the closure he had given to her in the end, the last person alive to see him happy.

She still heard Isaac's voice, tinny in her ears. He had wanted it, he said, to be powerful. To be in control. To let the computer steer him and shape him into a god. And she couldn’t blame him. She had seen the way Adrian treated him  – backstage, in the woods, dismissive cruelty always on his tongue.

She shook her head, stray hairs coming free from her ponytail, and she pressed a hand to her forehead. She had been right when she told her mother she couldn’t do it, couldn’t face the world and give an account of who Isaac had been.

Karen had no right to suppose who Isaac had been. She had done so much wrong by him. She’d had a hand in turning him into what he became. Even now, she couldn’t think of Isaac as a monster; he was just a misguided boy. He’d had so much of a future before him.

The more she spoke, the more it felt like an exorcism.

“He wanted to be important. He wanted to matter, to someone, to anyone. I think most people just didn’t notice him at all, including me. He went through life in the background, fading into the curtains  – an apt comparison, I think. After all, many of you were like me. You didn’t know Isaac before any of this happened. Hell, I only saw Isaac at his worst. You want the truth? Here it is. Isaac was dealt a shitty hand in life, and maybe we wouldn’t be here today if things had been better for him. Maybe he would be standing here beside me.”

She closed her eyes, and she was talking to Isaac’s parents, the pale man and woman she’d seen upon her return, their faces pinched with worry. They stood at the front of the crowd, tears heavy on their cheeks. She spoke to them. She laid it all out for them, not the story of the woods but the story of how Isaac Andrews held onto himself, the story of all the dead she knew. The survivors could tell their own tales, but for now, all she had was her own voice to dispel all the lies that had built up around the dead, around Isaac.

Somehow it only mattered that she spoke candidly of Isaac, that she didn’t stop talking  –  for his sake, and Adrian’s, and Ben’s, and for the couple that had stood at the edge of the crowd, waiting for their son to walk down from heaven.

**Author's Note:**

> "Death is but the next great adventure."  
> — Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter


End file.
